I step outside into the middle of a group of young people, Indigenous. A girl of twelve or thirteen (though she looks older. her clothes make her look older. the pain on her face makes her look older) stares down a boy, pubescent and gangling.
"At least let me slap you." Her brown eyes are fire with angry tears.
He looks back defiant, trying on that gangster slouch, but his cracked voice betrays him. "What? Its not like I murdered you."
Her voice is calm. Cold. "I don't give a fuck about murder. When you kill someone, they're dead. When you raped me, you took everything from me." Her friends stand protectively around her, stony faced.
This isn't some petty preteen dispute I have walked into. This is Real Fucking Life.
I want to help. I want to tell her she's a hero for confronting her assailant, calling him out, demanding some sort of justice. I want to tell her that he hasn't taken everything from her -- the fire in her eyes proves it. I want to hug her, because this isn't something that any girl should go through.
I don't do any of these things. I keep walking to my bus, past a pair of cops who are aggressively interrogating a black man who affably insists he has done no wrong. As I wait for my bus, the girl and her friends approach the police. The police have no time for her.
No white knights there. But then, I'm not convinced white knights are the champions this world needs. I tell myself this, maybe because it excuses me from having to be one.
I sit on the bus and I can feel my whiteness on me like soap scum. White is clean, they taught us. Brown is dirty. Black is sin.
Little white people teach little white lies.
White is just the shit we scrub on ourselves to erase the blood on our hands. White is the talcum powder we tap out daintily to cover up our own colonial stink.
I am conscious of this scum on me constantly, the false cleanliness, the baby powder scent of privilege.
White is like mildew, clinging to a rotted out social construct that has so long been secure in its predominance that it doesn't realize it is caving in on itself.
I can feel that whiteness hanging off of everything around me, making the air thick, making my lungs burn. I watch it snaking, smothering, stifling, like smoke. In that group of Indigenous teenagers, whiteness hung like a shadow or a puppeteer behind a screen, pulling the strings of trauma that led to violence that led to beautiful brown eyes shining with angry tears.
No, there is no room for heroism from white knights. Not when white knights keep colored civilians pinned, squirming and bleeding on the lance.
I don't know what to do.
I don't know what to do.
I do nothing, and I hate my whiteness more.
